What makes a media company take political sides?

The recent remarks on media by AAP's Arvind Kejriwal, the issue of paid news and the Big Fights(NDTV, etc.,) that happen on the subject of media and politics prompted me to write this column. Before you proceed on reading this, let me make it clear that this is not a generalization on media industry as there are always exceptions. I respect all such media companies who never compromise on editorial supremacy which keeps the spirit of democracy alive.

The Prelude

1 .    The moment one talks about media, the first thing that comes to mind is the print. It is only in the last three decades that electronic media has evolved. Of course, the latest development is that of the digital media that includes social media. Print is the longest surviving media in the world.

2.    James Augustus is considered as the Father of Indian Press as he started the first Indian newspaper, a weekly, from Kolkata, the Bengal Gazette in January 1780.

3.    The media companies of yesteryears like were launched with noble objective of fighting the British establishment and to build an agenda in the right direction for the common good. The ultimate goal was service and not profit alone. Some continue to exist while most have closed.

4.     In the last 234 years after the first newspaper, thousands of newspapers and magazines have been launched and several hundreds have closed. Added to this, with evolution of electronic media and opening up of the skies, several hundred TV channels have proliferated.

5.     At per the last count on 31^st March 2013, there are 94,067 publications (12,511 newspapers and 81,556 – periodicals) registered with RNI with a combined circulation numbers of 40,50,37,930. There are 778 TV channels as per official records. How many of them do we know? Maybe a handful??

6.     The large print media houses have integrated themselves by offering TV channels and internet based sources in addition to print.

How do they run? Some basics

1.     Ideally, the editorial section is supposed to be independent of business interests of the media organization. The ‘Lakshman rekha’ is breached in case of business interests involving crores of rupees of advertising. Some issues are never reported.

2.     The source of revenue for print is the advertisement and circulation while it is air time for electronic media. For print media, the ratio of advertisements to Circulation revenue could be anywhere between 60:40 or 90:10 depending on various factors and the revenue for TV channels is purely based on advertisement revenue.

3.     Advertising comes from government and other commercial establishments. While the commercial ads are obtained based on good circulation numbers, government ads are not necessarily so. A pro-establishment media house is likely to garner good government ads. If the same house is strong in the commercial space with good circulation numbers, it will not depend much on government ads and so the editorial in such cases is totally independent. In cases where there is no either ad revenue or circulation revenue, the editorial has no choice of independence or being critical of the establishment if it depended on them as for revenue.

4.    Paid News is one such phenomenon to augment or drive revenues.

Changing scenario

With increased competition in all spheres in the post-liberalized India, media too has been exposed to the normal vagaries of any other business as there are too many players chasing the same balls, I mean eye balls. With the result the advertiser is forced to look at the return on spend for every rupee of advertising. Most media have no answers for this and as advertising declines it leads to large scale losses for even the biggest media houses as fixed costs remain. The moment money stops flowing, having experienced the power of media, no media promoter would like to close the business. The first thing is to look for source of funds to keep it going. Some media houses openly sell their stake at undisclosed amounts to interested parties (read business houses) as we have seen in the recent past. It would be simply difficult to retain editorial supremacy in such a scenario.

Given a choice, what do political parties and big business houses need?

1.     Political parties need mouth pieces to campaign to the public on regular basis.

2.    Large corporates need someone to lobby on their behalf with the governments either at the Centre or at the State. So the media houses in red are easy targets for acquisition. With media power in hand and influence of money, they find a way to pump in funds as most media companies do not submit Annual statements to the respective legal bodies. Most of them are privately held. The political parties also do not reveal their source of funding and are against RTI on this subject. So it works both ways.

3.    With an environment in which there in no questioning the freedom of the press, some media houses take shelter in that freedom and expose themselves to this route of funding and are also not questioned.

4.     When the political funding happens in whatever way, the media house has no other choice but to support the fund-master either directly or indirectly.

Some media houses do get ‘sold’ in return for some funding just to stay afloat and to enjoy the freedom of press for promoting self-interests.

To conclude - In the scenario of all such undercurrents, we should not forget that the public, whether the TV audience or the readers, are quite intelligent and can easily make out the leanings of a media house. So there is no harm in media enjoying the freedom of press forever.